Starting Early In Schools to Bridge Achievement Gap

Arlington, Alexandria Find Ways to Help Immigrant Students Succeed in Classroom

Above the giggles of dozens of young, squeaky voices, Arlington teacher Naomi Cruz stands in front of her class and asks her students to name their favorite thing about preschool.

Jesus Rolando Aguilar’s antics show he is desperate to answer. His stubby 4-year-old hands surge into the air. They wave and whirl, until he tumbles out of his small bright blue plastic chair.

Cruz smiles and calls on him to answer.

“The Play-Doh,” Jesus giggles, clutching his tummy.

His large brown eyes look up, then down. Then his face turns noticeably earnest. He scratches his head — his thick black hair puffing into a wacky Albert Einstein mad-genius-at-age-4-type of coif.

“No, it’s that I made cupcakes with strawberries,” he says, as a chorus of his classmates shout, “Me, too, me, too!”

“Oh, and muffins,” he adds.

“That was” — he pauses for a few seconds, searching for a word, a phrase. “It was yum.”

Cruz smiles. Jesus has just displayed important vocabulary skills — skills he and many of his fellow non-native-English-speaking classmates lacked when they first entered the school system’s preschool program.

Jesus’s parents are from El Salvador, and his family speaks Spanish at home.

“What’s amazing is his vocabulary now,” Judy Apostolico-Buck, supervisor for early childhood development in Arlington, said as she observed the class. “Those words — strawberry, muffin. Those are really good words for him to know.”

The preschool class is the newest component of Arlington County Public Schools’ broad effort to reach out to its booming non-English-speaking population — a population that has more than doubled since 1980, growing to 25 percent this school year.

Hoping to get students started on literacy, math and social skills earlier, Arlington preschool classes are targeting at-risk students, which the district defines as those who are not native English speakers and those who qualify for the federal free and reduced-price lunch program — an indicator of poverty. Research shows that poverty is often an indicator of a child’s academic performance.

Although the classes are not mandatory, Superintendent Robert G. Smith hopes to one day make them available to all at-risk youngsters. This year, he has proposed adding money to double the preschool program and provide classes for an additional 80 students at five more elementary schools, at a cost of about $ 400,000.

Currently, the five-day-a-week program serves 80 students at four schools.

The preschool program and other efforts — ranging from providing students with extra tutoring to hiring more bilingual teaching assistants — are aimed at helping immigrant and minority students bridge the achievement gap that exists between them and white students.

As school systems across the region work harder on such efforts, some parents of non-minority students have expressed concern that spending for those programs may leave less money for other educational priorities.

School officials in Alexandria and Arlington said they rarely hear such complaints from parents, but when they do, they stress the long-term importance of the programs.

“We hope . . . people realize that if the United States is to continue to be the kind of country we want it to be, then these youngsters have to be educated and we need to bridge that achievement gap we are always talking about,” said Frank K. Wilson, vice chair of the Arlington School Board. “It’s shortsighted to do otherwise.”

For example, in Arlington, white students outperform black and Hispanic students — many of whom are immigrants or the children of immigrants — by 30 percentage points to 40 percentage points on the state Standards of Learning exams.

The Alexandria City Public Schools system is experiencing a similar trend, and officials there are also implementing special programs to help immigrant and minority students. The 11,167-student Alexandria system has seen its non-English-speaking population grow threefold since 1980, to 16 percent this school year.

As part of a three-year plan, Alexandria schools with high poverty rates — which also tend to have high numbers of immigrant students — are given extra funding that principals can use to provide special services for their immigrant populations. Principals can tailor programs to their specific community’s needs.

This year is the second year of the plan. One principal plans to use the money to hire translators who speak Urdu and Twi to assist at parent-teacher conferences. Another has used it to buy reading software that allows computer lessons to be given in English and Spanish.

“It’s a great way to do it because our immigrant population is not monolithic, and each school needs different things,” said Alexandria School Board member Sally Ann Baynard. “On the west end of Alexandria are many of the Middle Eastern and African immigrants; on the east end are many of the Salvadoran immigrants. For us, we depend on our principals to know where to put the funds.”

The challenge of educating large numbers of immigrants is one facing the increasingly diverse Washington region and the nation. And it comes at a critical time in the country’s history of immigration, because education is now far more important than it was during the first wave of new Americans during the turn of the 20th century, experts say.

“We are now in the midst of the largest number of new Americans in the history of our country and at the same time that education has emerged as a very high-stakes prospect,” said Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, co-director of the Harvard Immigration project, a five-year study tracking 400 immigrant students from Boston and San Francisco area schools to see how they adapt both socially and academically to American public schools.

At the turn of the 20th century, many public schools didn’t worry about educating immigrants because many new arrivals quickly dropped out of school to pursue well-paying blue-collar jobs.

An emerging issue for both school districts is that many of their non-English-speaking students were born in the United States — to immigrant parents. Yet those students don’t qualify for special state and federal funding aimed at helping local districts educate immigrant students, school officials said.

In Alexandria, 38 percent of its English as a Second Language (ESL) students were born in the United States; nearly half of Arlington’s ESL students were born here.

Still, with today’s competitive global economy and increased emphasis on standardized achievement tests, such as the SOLs, the larger concern is how to educate all students — especially those who may need extra language skills — so they can succeed.

“I think there is a feeling that the earlier you begin in education, the better it’s going to be because it will much more expensive to intervene later,” said Ann Mitchell, president of Early Childhood Policy Research, a New York-based company that studies education.

Immigrant parents are also now keenly aware that without a college education, their children are less likely to be able to attain the American dream.

Arlington parent Blanca Mejia, an immigrant from El Salvador, thought the county’s preschool program would give her daughter Roxana, now 9, a leg up.

“I thought this would really help us, because, yes, I want my kids to go to college one day,” Mejia said in Spanish. “She didn’t have any English, and she found ways to learn in preschool that really helped both her and me.”

Alexandria has also started a special summer-school program that focuses on giving extra class time to recent immigrants — at all grade levels — who are struggling to learn English. The extra months in school not only help the children with their language skills but also help them become more comfortable in an American classroom before the throngs of students arrive in September.

“I would say the summer-school program for [ESL] students is a very, very important component,” said Carol Lisi, director of ESL programs for Alexandria schools. “In fact, I can’t overstate the importance of summer school.”

Many school districts focus on preschool programs because research shows that students who start school earlier do better in kindergarten and beyond.

Alexandria public schools do not operate their own preschool program, in part because there are several popular city and privately funded ones. But they do have a special summer-school program for 4-year-olds with limited English skills.

Aside from that program, much of the funding for services for Alexandria’s immigrant students is under the control of school principals.

Under the “differentiated resources” program, schools with the largest numbers of poor students, many of whom are recent immigrants, receive extra money.

Tucker Elementary School — where 60 percent of the students qualify for free and reduced-price lunch and one of every two students is an immigrant — is using some of the $ 52,950 in extra money it received to buy translating devices so parents can listen to school meetings in Spanish, or any other language, while the principal speaks English.

Principal Kathy David also recruited volunteer — and paid — translators to help with parent-teacher conferences. A custodian from Sierra Leone has helped translate Twi, which is spoken in Ghana and other parts of Africa, for parents at meetings. This year, David also recruited people to translate Urdu (for students from Pakistan), Korean, Arabic and Spanish at conferences.

“In the early years, we had children translating, which, of course didn’t always get the message across during parent-teacher conferences,” David said. “When the parents are involved there is an even better chance of the students doing well.”

With research highlighting the importance of early childhood education, Smith, Arlington’s superintendent, has made the preschool program one of the cornerstones of his efforts to help immigrant and minority students succeed. He said the program leads to better reading and social skills and encourages parental involvement earlier in a child’s school career — and in a smaller setting that is less intimidating to parents.

“This is such an important element in eliminating the achievement gap,” Smith said. “It may be one of the more important things we do, and it’s been proven to work by researchers. We have also seen the difference.”

In Ann Purser’s Arlington preschool class, those skills are stressed with activities such as dancing with a partner and lessons on helping each other clean up papers strewn about the room after an art class.

Students work together on matching pictures that are pasted up around the room with words. They also practice saying one another’s names.

The classrooms are decorated in bright reds and yellows and greens, with bulletin boards that have paper cutouts of snowmen and pancakes and trucks.

As Purser jumped up and down during a dance session, one of her students pointed out that he could spot his shadow.

Purser had taught the lesson on shadows the previous week. Her student’s recall of the lesson made her smile and jump just a little higher.



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